One can imagine the music the ancient travellers on the Silk Road must have heard as the sun dipped behind the cliffs and the caravanserai hove into view. This is a song of the steppes, evocative of both the east and of dark Slavic folk. Which comes rather quickly, the album being a brief 39 minutes long.ĭuda aimed (apparently) to have less eastern/oriental influences in this album than the others however he didn’t completely escape them, as can clearly be heard in the title track. Not every track is a folk-rock juggernaut, of course, but the overall feel is one of chugging forward motion, right to the end.
There are monstrously heavy, distorted bass riffs, chants and shouts, layered acoustic guitar, thudding drumbeats (Mariusz plays everything on this album, including the drums), and of course Duda’s soaring vocals throughout (words and wordless). However, while the words evoke a yearning search for resolution, the music is for the most part hard, bright, and upbeat, driving the album along.
Lyrically, the album falls in with the story arc of the first two LS albums: death and rebirth, facing the past or losing it, and Duda does dip deliberately into the lyrical past with clear references to LS I and II. It is impossible for me to sit still while this album plays, and I mean that quite literally. And there is no hesitation - right from the first note the album kicks into high gear, plugging straight into that ancient part of the brain that is connected to rhythm, pulse, and heartbeat. The eastern Slavic influence gives a weightiness to the the tracks that the music of the early LS albums did not possess. The early albums tended towards ambience with some heavy moments worked in but this album is pure joyous folk-rock. The seventh Lunatic Soul album, Through Shaded Woods, heralds a return to the acoustic folk-themed feel of the first three albums, but it follows a different path. With the fourth album, the project shifted to something sparser, electronic, and song-driven rather than atmospheric, but even so, hints of that primal heart sneaked through. The earlier albums ( LS I, II, and Impressions ) weren’t strictly folk-driven, but did have a rich, vaguely eastern feel that served much the same purpose. That music dug in more deeply than anything had before, finding a Lunatic Soul-shaped space inside me I didn’t even know was empty. I was too young to understand it in terms of music appreciation, but it was the beginning, and eventually led to an abiding love of folk-rock. The great choruses and rich folk melodies hit some deep spot in me that must have been there from the beginning. That soundtrack was Doctor Zhivago, and I was captivated by Maurice Jarre’s dark, orchestral take on old Slavic traditional music (and the pomp of Russian classical).
I remember the first movie soundtrack that had an impact on me, lingering long after I watched the movie.
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